AI posters cause tension in the Theatre Arts Department

The University of Idaho’s Theatre Arts Department used AI to create last semester’s spring show posters.  

In the past, the Theatre Arts Department would hire students or members of the community to design the posters for the plays and musicals the department puts on every year.   

Hailey Blackstone is a senior studying Theatre Arts. Blackstone helps with scenic and prop design and construction within the Theatre Arts Department.  

According to Blackstone, it costs around $100 to pay someone to design a poster. AI became a cost-saving measure for the department. 

“I think it has a severe negative impact,” Blackstone said. “The department has a stance on creating art and teaching students how to be artists.” 

Blackstone also went on to say that a poster is a pivotal part of the show and that students are robbed of that opportunity with the use of AI.  

Blackstone said that this caused a lot of tension within the department and the only posters created with AI were last year’s productions.  

“I’m not against AI,” Blackstone said. “I believe it is a tool to be used and not a supplement for art.” 

According to Robert Caisley, the Chair of the Theatre Arts Department, the use of AI to design posters started when they lost a member of staff who was in charge of the marketing. They were unable to fill that role and needed posters for the upcoming shows, so they turned to AI.  

“I am a playwright, so I should share the same anxieties that many artists have about AI-generated content and the impact on my own livelihood, but I don’t,” Caisley wrote in an email to the Argonaut. “AI can certainly generate acceptable writing, and it can certainly mimic an existing or easily identifiable style. But it’s not great writing.” 

Caisley also wrote that the Theatre Arts Department has a limited budget and production expenses have gone up in recent years.  

Caisley went on to write that their marketing director was asked to work part-time for the Lionel Hampton School of Music and that became too overwhelming for them, so Caisley suggested the use of AI.  

“While I understand the anxiety surrounding AI, I would say that history is chock-full of examples of technology threatening human expression and capability,” Caisley wrote. “In my own field, in the 1920s theatre producers were threatened by the arrival of the motion picture, and later, film producers were similarly challenged by the advent of sound, and then of television.” 

The Theatre Arts Department has hired a new Marketing and Communications Director who will be making the new posters for the upcoming semester.  

“For a period of time our department used AI technology to create posters for our season,” Caisley wrote. “They were not examples of great art. They were commercial and expedient. They were what we could manage to produce given the constraints of budget and human resources at the time.” 

Andrea Roberts can be reached at [email protected].